Only An Active Community Can Ensure Sensible Growth

Few of us think much about city planning. The demands of job and family and shrinking dollars provide little time for brooding about balancing renewal with preservation.

Unfortunately, that leaves developers as the principal activists, and developers by nature incline toward development.

But without healthy checks and balances and without some input from the “little people,” development soon alters forever the scale and style of a community. All too often, the reasons why some of us love and treasure our home in the first place disappear.

To preserve some of the precious flavor of where we live, growth has to be looked at carefully by all of us, not just the professionals presumably qualified to deal with it. What we tend not to notice is the extent to which builders and developers influence elected officials and civil servants, regardless of the effect on the community.

This is not an anti-developer attack. We need developers, risk-takers and aggressive entrepreneurs to forge our future. However, when we let them build what they want with no regard to the long-term consequences of their quest for profit, we suffer later, even if the conveniences we sample in the meantime make it seem worthwhile.

Coeur d’Alene in particular is on the verge of watching the delectable quality of its downtown vanish like a morning mist. The departure of restaurants and other businesses, new and old, threatens to make Sherman Avenue’s charming character disappear. Inevitably the calls have begun to do a major facelift.

The solution of the typical developer is to pour in investment money, creating jobs with new projects that result in a fresh look that resembles everywhere else. When community flavor and charm disappear, they are usually gone for good.

Increased civic size in our time means homogenization. Every town starts to look like every other town.

Some cities, such as Portland, Ore., and Santa Fe, N.M., have managed the trick. Large cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, can reinvent themselves periodically with newer, larger and fancier buildings. What makes these cities what they are, what gives them their sense of pulse, is this ongoing revision and change in the context of their scale.

It’s very different with a smaller community, where major change, even over time, causes such convulsions that residents one day awake to find they are living in a strange place.

The answer lies in activism. More of us must get involved in the planning of what should be built, and where it should go, and the type of community we want. Left to the push of the market, the answer will always be bigger, newer and more corrosive to a charming life.

This is not an attempt to thwart freedom, but rather to use the political process for its primary purpose: allowing the majority to determine its fate. As an example, the enormous Fred Meyer store going into Coeur d’Alene could not come at a worse time for the downtown. Its arrival coincides with a difficult period for Sherman Avenue, as the greater convenience and purchasing power of the large chains and malls lure more and more people away from the folksy, small-town ambience of Coeur d’Alene’s historical center.

Each such massive arrival has put small merchants out of business, yet each in the short run will bring consumers more convenience and greater purchasing power.

Healthier communities are made up of many small businesses rather than a few large ones. But it is a hard, hard balancing act, making sure those growing businesses and those demands for convenience and lowest prices don’t tip us over the line, inexorably giving us a life less sweet than the one we have now.

So another giant store moves into town, and the consumer can buy a toaster at the same place he or she buys the bread to put in it. Often the larger chains, with increased purchasing power, can charge retail buyers less for some items than the smaller stores themselves have to pay at wholesale. The consumer benefits.

After all, if prudent homemakers don’t shop for bargains, they’re wasting money. So who can blame us for flocking to the giants, and who can blame the giants for digging in and investing for more market share?

But the long-term effects of this will spin us into a grim future that, like a single-crop farm, is less resistant to disease and decay.

I have thought since I first attended them that the Kootenai County Fair and Spokane’s Pig Out in the Park would be better off without entries from corporate giants like Domino’s and Sizzler. The sales at these events can’t add much to the big firms’ very large coffers, yet the smaller outfits generate significant income for the families and small businesses that own them. The events lose their zest if the participants are too corporate.

This issue, seemingly trivial, underscores how hard it is to strike an effective balance - to preserve the special flavor of the small community, but still tap into the advantages of size.

Any county, state or nation that gives an automatic no to growth will fade from the scene. But the middle way, the way of planning, consensus and control, contains the components of growth plus the preservation of our special treasures.

The answer must be found in greater citizen involvement with growth issues - oversight committees, design-review panels, planning groups - people who have no direct financial gain in automatically opening the doors to every developer with a bushel of cash.

It will take active effort, like almost anything else worthwhile in life, but the future will thank us.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Fred Glienna Contributing writer